Atom vs. Nano, Episode One

IT’S INTERESTING TO SEE how VIA and Nvidia carved up the low power consumption market according to their own needs. VIA – having launched the Nano – is targeting the low-power/low-price range of desktops and notebooks and the UMPC market. Nvidia is going for the MID market. Each one will face Intel’s Atom individually – as the Atom crosses over both segments. Today a couple of sites have published some very introspective coverage of both launches, as well as some numbers of what you can expect from either marchitecture.

Legit Reviews got to do a tour of Centaur’s Nano testing facility and has this very exclusive insider view of how things work at CPU, with photos, spec sheets and enough benchmarks to raise some eyebrows in the Intel camp. Things are definitely getting interesting in this arena. Although VIA didn’t provide numbers comparing the Nano to the Atom, it’s interesting to see there’s quite a performance jump from the C7 to the Nano.

Anandtech on the other hand, is focusing much more on the Computex side of things, with the Asus announcement of the Eee Box, a (sort of) Nettop solution from Asus, following the footsteps of the Eee PC. It’s an Atom in a box, with a form factor smaller than an Apple TV. It looks like an appliance, but performs like early Centrinos. Check out Anand’s article.

Hardware Logic usually doesn’t get into mobos, but considering the massive roll-out taking place, they’ve done their review on an Asus M3N78-EMH HDMI. Based on the GeForce 8200 chipset, the teeny weenie micro-ATX mobo packs a punch and then some. Four DIMM slots support up to 8GB o’ DDR2 RAM and you can socket a Phenom in it without worrying about the CPU’s power requirements. Although Mathew did some overclocking, it’s hard to see where the Phenom starts and the chipset ends. Read on.

Still on the subject of teenie-weenies, Laptop Mag reviewed the MSI Wind. Laptop Mag has had the pleasure of reviewing the Eee PCs in the past, and Joanna has some perspective on the matter. Powered by the 1.6GHz Atom, the Wind has a nice little feature that’ll interest all the geeks out there – a Turbo button. Yes. That long-lost feature has returned and in this case pressing it provides you an instant 300MHz gratification. The review is topped with some handy upgrade tutorials for the ultra-small notebook. Joanna gave it high-scores. Catch it here.

Red & Blackness is reviewing Zalman’s Trimon monitor today. The gadget promises to turn everything into a beautiful, eye-twisting, 3D world, but only on Nvidia cards, and even then, only if you accept the performance hit it takes to double-render frames. Ville thinks the 3D feature is worthwhile, nevertheless, if you have the buck to spend. Read the review.

Belkin used to make a really cool looking robot-hand-like controller named the Nostromo. That was about 5 years ago. Now they’ve resorted to Razer to update their line with the Nostromo n52te – with this gamepad you can store macros and key mappings access them through the 15 buttons and the D-Pad, which will also let you play games like Assassin’s Creed in a much more arcade/console fashion. Read on. µ